When Historiography Met Epistemology

Sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French-speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century

Series:

In
When Historiography Met Epistemology, Stefano Bordoni shows the emergence of sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. That process involved mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, and was deeply linked to other processes that transformed the cultural and material landscape of Europe. In the literature, the emergence of the history and philosophy of science is chronologically associated with the turn of the twentieth century: the author points out that this meaningful starting point should be moved backwards. Since the 1860s, sophisticated histories of science and critical meta-theoretical remarks on scientific practice began to compete with naïve historical reconstructions and dogmatic views on science.

Biographical Note

Stefano Bordoni, Ph.D. (2007), Pisa University, is Lecturer in Mathematics at Bologna University, and lecturer in Philosophy of Science at Urbino University. He has published several books and many articles on the history of science, and on the history of physics.

Review Quotes

"By and large this work is very well-researched and extremely interesting. For those interested in the history of science and scientists’ thinking regarding philosophical issues, especially on the continent during the nineteenth century, this work is a valuable addition to scholarship."
- Richard Feist,
Metascience (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-018-0307-1), published on 7 March 2018.

"By positioning itself chiefly in relation to the historiographic theories advanced by I. Benrubi, A. Brenner et J. Renn, [...] this book constitutes, on the whole, a veritable and most welcome plea in favour of recognizing the complexity of the natural world, as well as the no less important historical and philosophical complexity of the scientific approach which is called to investigate it!"
- Jean-François Stoffel (Haute École Louvain-en-Hainaut), International Journal for the Historiography of Science (June 2017), pp. 163-165. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24117/2526-2270.2017.i2.16